“For my Ph.D. studies at Princeton University, I was the first to implement the result of this extensive work in seismic tomography for the reconstruction of the Earth's velocity structure. This paper is the result of that effort.”

The mantle plume hypothesis, as formulated by W. Jason Morgan of Princeton University in 1971, and featured in geology textbooks ever since, states that ocean islands like Hawaii are the result of hot plumes rising up from the Earth’s lower mantle. More recently, the plume hypothesis came under heavy attack, mainly because any seismic evidence for their existence was lacking. By improving the theory and technical aspects of seismic tomography—a technique used to derive images of the Earth’s interior—we obtained much sharper images that show a full collection of plumes reaching deep into the Earth's mantle, essentially confirming Morgan’s original hypothesis. This result is of importance for geodynamicists, geochemists, and geologists, as it provides a better understanding of the dynamic of the Earth’s mantle when considered in light of the presence of such deep mantle plumes.

While the confirmation of mantle plumes is useful to geologists, geochemists, and geodynamicists, in order to provide for a better understanding of the dynamic of the Earth's mantle, the newly improved procedure of the imaging of seismic data is of even broader interest to seismologists, who may apply it to many other seismological studies.

Our paper shows the results of a novel method of an inversion of seismic data that has allowed us to significantly improve the images of the Earth’s interior, clearly showing the deep-source region of many volcanoes around the world—called "hotspots."

The seismology group at Princeton has been working for many years on a new theory for the modeling of the propagation of seismic waves through properly accounting for diffraction phenomena. For my Ph.D. studies at Princeton University, I was the first to implement the result of this extensive work in seismic tomography for the reconstruction of the Earth's velocity structure. This paper is the result of that effort.